Jason Jensen 0:00:05.4: 

My name is Jason Jensen. I work for CMC. I am the Capex Manager at CMC. So what that involves, a lot of times we talk capex, a lot of people think, oh, just my capex budget. At CMC, we are a steel company and we have roughly 500 projects, $600 million in capital that we spend every year, and I help decide which projects we're going to move forward, how we're going to execute those projects, and bringing all of that together so we choose the right projects to put our money towards.  

  

Steve Werner 0:00:39.6: 

Nice. Well, tell us a little bit around CMC. I don't know if everybody got it, but on the title there it said Forges for a reason. I don't know if you guys caught that or not, but tell us a little bit just who is CMC? What does the company do? This was education for me, because I had no idea, right, that this was so pervasive in just everywhere. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:01:05.2: 

So we are a really early-stage construction company. Our primary focus is still manufacturing. We produce rebar, that is our biggest product. We are the largest rebar producer in the United States. If Nucor says differently, they're lying to you. 

 

Steve Werner 0:01:25.3: 

Who's Nucor?! 

 

Jason Jensen 0:01:26.8: 

So Nucor - yes. So we produce rebar. You may not realize, rebar is in just about everything that you do, touch or drive on. You just don't realize it because we cover it up with concrete. The rebar is actually what holds it up. It is the backbone of the America that we talk about. Things like we talked about going to the Cowboys game earlier this morning. Jerry World is held up by CMC rebar. So it goes in everything. I take my kids to Disneyland and show them Star Wars World and all that pretty stucco and concrete. That's all actually held up by rebar. So it is what holds everything up. All of your bridges on your freeways, most likely held up by rebar. So that is what we focus on. We've been expanding out a little bit. Just acquired a concrete precast, just recently. That gets into a little bit more concrete. But front-end construction is what we do.  

 

Steve Werner 0:02:27.0: 

Nice. Tell us a little bit around just like as a company, where are you located, or is this a global company? Are you mostly in the US space? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:02:36.3: 

We are mostly, mostly in the US. We are headquartered right here in Irving, Texas, 15 minutes from here, not very far away is our global. We have steel mills across mostly the south of the United States, from Arizona, across the south, and then up into New Jersey, and then we also have a steel operation in Poland. Aside from our steel mills, we have, I believe, 11 steel mills. We have roughly 30 to 40 recyclers that are bringing in all your scrap metals. So when you've wrecked your car, your old fridge, all of that goes to the recycler. It gets shredded up, goes to our steel mill, we melt it into rebar. Then we have, on the other side, our rebar fabricators, who then take that rebar, actually bend it into the right shape. It's a lot like Tinkertoys where you bend it to the right shape, and then it goes out to a construction site, and they piece it all together and wire it up and cover it in concrete. 

 

Steve Werner 0:03:35.3: 

So yes, we were just standing in the back there, I was asking him all kinds of questions, like how do you transport? Just tell them a little bit around just the logistics, from the time you have molten steel, basically right, to the time that it becomes rebar. How do you transport that around? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:03:50.8: 

Mostly it's transported. Once it becomes rebar, it gets transported on flatbed semis. We roll it at the steel mill. Most of our steel mills can actually cut it to length, plus or minus one inch. I will tell you, we were very good at getting it to length. Get the exact requirements that you need in your steel mill. It's typically around 60-foot lengths of rebar. Then we ship it, typically to a rebar fabricator because they'll bend it into the right shapes. If you get into paving jobs like freeways, we may - because that is just straight bar, you don't need to bend it - we may ship it right to the construction site, and they will roll it off the truck, lay it on the ground, cover it in concrete, and there's your freeway. 

 

Steve Werner 0:04:37.1: 

We just had a driveway redone about a year ago, and that's impressive how they get all that prepped and everything with the rebar. Okay, last question here in terms of about CMC, what is that picture, it looks like Star Wars Land, explain to everybody what that is. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:04:54.2: 

So that picture right there is actually the end of a furnace. So you'll see there's a large, you can call it a bucket, we call that a ladle, that is full of steel. That one probably has about 40 tons of molten steel inside of it. Then you'll see on the other side there, it kind of cut off in this picture, but there's a stream of molten steel filling up the next little ladle right below it. So we bring all that scrap in, we heat it up to roughly 2500°F, turn it into molten steel, and then we carry it over to what we call a caster, and that caster shapes it and rolls it out into rebar. 

 

Steve Werner 0:05:34.9: 

That's very cool. That's awesome. I had to ask, right?  

 

Jason Jensen 0:05:37.9: 

Yes. 

 

Steve Werner 0:05:39.9: 

Because we were talking about Star Wars before. Well, let's get into the real business in terms of what you manage here. Just tell us about what did capital planning look like before you had an Anaplan? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:05:51.3: 

So prior to Anaplan - steel making is a very capital-intensive business. When you're melting up steel to that heat, things wear down very quickly. You have to replace parts very quickly. It's also very expensive for a steel mill to be shut down. In Arizona, we measure the cost of being down in minutes, and it's thousands of dollars a minute. So it's very expensive to shut your steel mill down, and so we need to keep… 

 

Steve Werner 0:06:21.5: 

And to re-start, right? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:06:22.8:  

And to re-start, because once it goes down - bad things happen if it goes down unexpectedly, because if you have molten steel in that ladle and you go down, getting that steel out of that ladle once it cools down is not a fun task or a cheap task, I imagine. So it becomes very important that we keep our operations running. To do that, we have capital projects that we execute throughout the year. Just to keep the lights on, we spin $250-plus million just to keep the lights on and replace equipment that gets broken down. Those projects range anywhere from replacing a furnace, which could be $90 million over three or four years, to fixing just a baghouse motor that's $25,000, takes you a day or two, once you get the motor, to install it. A whole range of different projects. Prior to Anaplan, the way we decided which projects to do is we had an Excel spreadsheet that went out to all the different sites, and they literally just typed a name to the project, guessed maybe what month and/or year they thought they were going to spend that money in.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:07:41.3: 

Then they sent that in and we compiled that list of just names of projects with made-up numbers of how much we're going to spend on that project. Then our leadership team looked at that list and tried to figure out which projects we needed to do and which projects were the most efficient. Then we turned around and said, 'Okay, that's your plan, now go do it.' We quickly learned that a lot of those projects, like quite honestly, a third of those projects on our plan, we never even started because we didn't really need to do them in the first place. They were just placeholders. A third of the projects we did start were never on our plan, so we brought those on later. Then the projects that became, we would typically be 50 to 70 per cent over budget, and almost never finishing a project on time. So it wasn't good and everything was done in Excel. When you get into the approval process, we would submit a SharePoint workflow. People would put in any number of approvers, but also because we had no visibility or planning, everyone wanted to be in the approval process.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:08:51.6: 

So a corporate IT manager was literally reviewing whether we needed to replace a motor on a water pump at a steel mill, and IT doesn't touch that project, but because they've been bitten in the past, everyone wanted to be in the approval process. 

 

Steve Werner 0:09:07.8: 

Interesting. So what did that do to your approval cycles? It sounds like that just extended them out forever. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:09:14.4:  

Yes. So our average approval time, from the time somebody - after it was in the plan, they said, hey, we want to do this project. They build a project, submit it for approval. It would take upwards of 28 days to get the project approved. If your bids are good for 30 days, that's not a lot of time to go execute on those contracts, to even try and keep on budget to begin with.  

 

Steve Werner 0:09:37.8: 

What about project priorities? Was that working at all, in terms of… 

 

Jason Jensen 0:09:42.7: 

No. 

 

Steve Werner 0:09:44.5:  

I mean we all love Excel.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:09:45.3:  

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:09:46.3: 

I love Excel. I use Excel all the time, but there's only so much… 

 

Jason Jensen 0:09:49.9: 

No, we jokingly refer to it now as we use the peanut butter method, which is everyone submitted their projects. We know we can't spend everything everyone wants to spend. So to cut our budget down, we would just go back and say, 'Hey, we need to cut, 50 million from our plan budget next year.' And that would go to the different division vice presidents, and they would be like, 'Okay, well, this division vice president, you need to cut 20, and you need to cut 20, and you're smaller, you need to cut 10.' Then they would go back to their locations and just say, 'Hey, you need to cut 5 million out of your budget.' We weren't really basing it on needs, as much as everyone just has to cut a little bit from their project. Which also resulted in sites over-inflating the third of the projects we didn't need. Where sites really over-inflating what they needed just to get a bigger budget that they were never going to execute. 

 

Steve Werner 0:10:49.1: 

So what were those primary drivers there for doing a transformation, those executives that you mentioned as they got involved in that, what were they looking for in terms of the outcomes to drive? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:10:59.6: 

So really the outcomes were not - and we talk about it all the time, we didn't want to cut spending. We want to spend our capex budget. What we are looking to accomplish is knowing what projects we're going to do and deciding which projects were best so we could put some methodology around choosing the correct projects, but then also executing those projects on time and on budget, because many of our projects were over budget. I think what made it worse was during the Covid years, things got very expensive and we had projects that were 100-plus per cent over budget, which really focused in the fact that we didn't know what we were going to spend each year anyway.  

 

Steve Werner 0:11:46.0:  

Okay. Yes, a lot of challenges there. Well let's talk a little bit around your journey with Anaplan. So just walk us through it, from the beginning. Where did you guys get started? How did you really figure out what to start using to get out of Excel, to have the biggest impact? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:12:06.2: 

So we had known for several years that we needed to do something different. However, there were different priorities. Our engineering group, who typically manages, or the project managers for our projects, they had their set of priorities and what they needed to do. On the flip side, FP&A had their priorities and they really just wanted to know what the cash was going to happen and be able to do the financial planning. Both sides would bring an idea to the table on how to solve our issues, and the other side would veto, well, that doesn't give us what we need. So that went on for probably a year or two, and then our VP of engineering - I was working in finance at the time, but him and I had a close working relationship from when I was in operations - reached out to me, and he created this position as a capex manager, and my number one task, when I took on the job, was go find a software to manage our capex portfolio, and help us manage our individual projects.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:13:13.2: 

Because it's not just managing the portfolio, it's how do we execute the projects, keep the projects on task, budget, not just to a project level, but we budget all the way down to - we've executed a contract with Cache Valley Electric for electrical work. We're going to budget to that specific contract in the project. So how do we do that? I went to Google, honestly. Googled capex software. Things came up. Reached out to Anaplan. Reached out to a number of different providers and quite honestly, met with Brian Goss at Anaplan, and he really helped walk me through the way because I didn't know the IT world, I knew the finance world. I can operate and tell people what to do. I don't know the first thing about IT. I joke all the time, I type with two fingers, but that's not a joke. I type with two fingers. So I made my kids, by the way, take the regular type thing so they actually know how to do it, and they just thumbs. Mavis Beacon Typing. I never turned it on.  

 

Steve Werner 0:14:16.0:  

My dad was a typing teacher in high school, for 30 years. So I was ground to death on learning how to type, on a typewriter to start too, he made me start there.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:14:28.8:  

Yes, fortunately in school, in middle school, we had a typing class. I changed schools in the year and you either had to take typing or shop, and then you split back of the year. I took shop twice in a row.  

 

Steve Werner 0:14:41.1:  

Nice.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:14:42.5: 

At the time I thought I made the wiser choice. As I got older, I was like, maybe that typing class was… 

 

Steve Werner 0:14:46.9: 

Shop was a lot of fun though. I remember. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:14:48.7: 

It was a lot of fun.  

 

Steve Werner 0:14:51.7: 

But we digress.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:14:52.3: 

Yes, reached out to them. Walked through at this - showed what Anaplan could do. I knew very early on, okay, Anaplan is the solution. This is what we need to do. Went back to our leadership and said, 'Hey, I think this is what we're going to do.' They said, 'Hey, it's not my choice. So let's see all of the solutions.' So we brought in a number of different vendors to demonstrate what they could do. Going into that meeting - back up a little bit - Brian introduced us to our partner Carter, who really helped build everything. Okay, they didn't help. They built everything that we did. He brought them along just early on in this process. They came in. I will tell you, going into the meeting, I worked for engineering, I tried to sell engineering on it, but when you look up Anaplan, finance is what comes up first. They were really leaning more towards one of these construction management softwares. That was where they were headed, and Carter actually tells a story.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:16:04.5: 

They were in the lobby, and my boss' boss, our VP of engineering, was on the phone and kind of, 'We're not really interested in these guys, but you'll want to come tomorrow and the next day to see the next software.' Carter and Anaplan came in and really just blew it out of the park. They showed what Anaplan could do. They were changing the model on the fly, as people were asking questions during the demonstration. Highlighting how easy it is to build and navigate. We went out to dinner that day and everyone was like, 'Do we even need to see anyone else?' They chose to go first and it actually paid off for them. Nobody really cared - and then everyone else, nobody lived up to what they could do. So we knew, coming out of that meeting in June, that we were going with Anaplan, and moved forward with that.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:16:59.3: 

At that point, it still took a long time to navigate the bureaucracy of corporate America, I guess you would say. So we didn't actually sign contracts until October, as far as getting that done. We kicked off October of last year. So just over a year ago, we kicked off this project. Started building in November. Carter went to work. We had wrote off, it was almost 30 pages of what we wanted to be able to do. We had a very detailed work structure of what we needed to do in our project management software. Carter went to work and built that. We were testing by December. We did UAT in the slides. I put March. Carter just reminded me, we actually did UAT in February. So we did UAT in February. We started training everyone in March, and we went live in April, building our entire capital plan, building all our projects. Talk a little bit about our projects, because when we talk capex, this is building the entire work breakdown structure of every line item we're going to build on the project is built into an Anaplan.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:18:15.2: 

So we are budgeting all the way down to each individual contract and building that out into our plan. So when our leadership team gets a project and they want to go into the details, they can actually go into the details, see, hey, this is the project. If we have attached quotes, they can go check the quotes and verify, hey, does this bid look good? Or hey, let's send it back because I think you may have underquoted. We've seen this same project, that this other meal cost 50 per cent more. We can start to get a better budget before we even approve our projects.  

 

Steve Werner 0:18:49.5: 

Nice. Yes, just note, those are Qs, now Ws, or not Ys. Those are quarters, not years, in terms of what they are looking at, as they're a fairly new customer.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:19:03.7: 

Yes, like I said… 

 

Steve Werner 0:19:03.9: 

It was barely over a year, right, barely over a year since. That's impressive.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:19:09.2: 

[Over speaking] Anaplan.  

 

Steve Werner 0:19:09.6: 

Yes, that's impressive. What did that look like just in terms of rolling that out to the rest of the org? It looks like you guys, you trained, what, 80-plus users?  

 

Jason Jensen 0:19:19.4: 

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:19:19.5: 

How did that work?  

 

Jason Jensen 0:19:20.8: 

We started off with roughly 80-plus users, really to how do they build their budgets in Anaplan? Because it's a very detailed budget. So we rolled that out. We knocked it out within a month. We kind of went on the world tour, as I joked about, where we spent a week in Arizona, took care of our West Coast project managers. Came here to Texas to do with our central project managers. Went to the East Coast in Atlanta, took over at East coast. Then we have a steel mill in Poland. So we actually then went out to Poland, trained all of our European project managers out there on really how to build their budgets. We had a general what they did in Excel, but converting that, now we're going to build your budget into Anaplan. Then it's a lot more work for them to build their plan. So we also had to sell them on, yes, it's no longer a wish list. Our capital plan is not just hey, I wish we could build this. It's now a plan and this is what we're going to do and what we're going to buy.  

 

Steve Werner 0:20:20.6:  

Nice, yes. Well tell us about some of the impact that you've had across the organization and some of the real outcomes that you've already seen in terms of this year-long journey that you've been on.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:20:34.6: 

So I mean some of the initial impacts the initial impacts were - we have visibility of all of our projects, not just our wish list, but we have a visibility of the projects that are ongoing. A number of our projects, many of our projects take multiple years, when you're rebuilding a furnace or some of these construction projects. So we have visibility of all of our in-flight projects, but we can see how much we've spent on those projects, how much we've committed in POs, and then our forecasts, which helped improve our ability to forecast, but also to catch projects that are going over budget, so we can make decisions before we spend all the money. In our old process, we had very little visibility, and it was very much we asked for forgiveness than permission. I was just as guilty. I joke. Sometimes I got this job because I did everything wrong and they're punishing, my penance was that I had to go fix all the loopholes. You put in a project, you put in your made-up number, and then you go spend 50 per cent more.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:21:38.2: 

Then when that project's done, you went back and said, 'Oh, by the way, our project was 50 per cent over budget. Will you re-approve it?' They can't say no because the money is out the door. That was how we managed things. So now we're able to see that decision and get ahead of that, and we can make decisions in real-time. Is this a project we want to continue on? And 90 per cent, the answer is yes, but maybe we need to make some changes or change the scope of the project to help keep it within budget. 

 

Steve Werner 0:22:07.0:  

 

So that's visibility and smarter capital allocation and everything. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:22:10.8: 

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:22:11.8: 

What about on the efficiency that you've seen or that strategic alignment? Give us some examples there. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:22:17.5:  

Yes, some of the inefficiencies. So I talked a little bit about our SharePoint approvals, and every single person wanted to be involved in the approvals, but it was never consistent. We would have a project that would maybe have ten people approve it from start to finish, or we'd have a project that would have 30 different people approve it, and there was no reason why, it was just whoever they put into that SharePoint. You knew who the final approver had to be based on… 

 

Steve Werner 0:22:43.5: 

What about those IT people that wanted to be involved? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:22:46.0: 

IT wanted to be involved. Environmental wanted to be involved. Our procurement team wanted to be involved. Everyone wanted a say, but none of them actually had a say. They just wanted to click that approve box themselves. We were able to, because we now have visibility, we can actually have our entire plan built. Environmental can look at that plan before it ever gets submitted as a project, and identify which projects environmental need us to get improved. IT can look at those projects before it ever gets submitted, and identify, okay, these are the projects that IT needs to be involved in because it may affect what we put into our PLCs. We have that visibility of the plan and the details of the project beforehand, and we've added into our processes where, hey, you need to make sure that IT has looked at this project before you submit it. Put in some of that work up front, and what used to take us 28 days to get a project from start to finish, we're averaging 6 days from start to finish, to get a project approved.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:23:49.8: 

So our projects are getting approved quicker, which means we can start our projects quicker. That also helps keep us in budget because now our bids are still good, when you get a 30-day bid, 6 days means you still have time to now execute that PO and the price hasn't gone up, and prices change every day right now. So it helps with that. Then even we get to the other process of picking which projects are going to be in our plan, and that peanut butter method that we talked about. In our old process, we would submit our list of projects for the next year in May, and then we would go back and forth, hey, you need to cut a million. Which projects are you going to cut? And they would decide and come back and forth. Or we would just change the value of the project to bring it down to the million, and still actually spend the same amount we're going to spend. That would all happen. It would take sometimes into November. Our fiscal year starts in September. Sometimes into November, before we've settled on all the projects in the plan and what those made-up numbers for the plan were going to be.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:24:54.0:  

This year we didn't get the list of projects to our leadership team until August. They were able to review all of their projects, make the decisions themselves on which projects should be in the plan and which ones can maybe get pushed to a future year, within a week. 

 

Steve Werner 0:25:15.0: 
Wow.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:25:16.5: 

By the end of August, we knew what our plan is, and we had a plan to then take to our board of directors and say, this is what we're going to do, and that had never been done. 

 

Steve Werner 0:25:26.1: 

Those cycles are just speeding up even more these days.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:25:29.5: 

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:25:30.0: 

Well let's talk a little bit about lessons learned, and obviously, you had an awesome partner, right, that you worked with. So I think we've covered off on that. What, in hindsight, when you look back on the last year, or even before that, the six months when you were going through this project, what were some lessons learned that you want to share with everybody? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:25:52.1: 

Yes, so some of the issues we ran into, so data migration. The data migration that Carter put together worked. What we found… 

 

Steve Werner 0:26:02.6: 

Is this the Carter team right here? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:26:04.7: 

The Carter team is over there.  

 

Steve Werner 0:26:04.6: 

Thank you guys. Good job, yes.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:26:08.6: 

The data migration worked. However, what we found was the data that we had was terrible, and also inconsistent. So we uploaded data from a source that we thought was the best source of truth, and most of our projects, I would still have sites coming back to me and say, hey, you know, that's wrong. It was approved for this amount. So even our data migration, we brought it in from our sites. There was still a lot of changing. Even today, we're still fixing some of the in-flight projects because the data we had, it really highlighted how bad our system was in the past, because there's not a single source of hey, what was that project supposed to be built on? Even if it got pre-approved, did that ever get recorded in our system? So we had a lot more struggles with data migration than we realized. Another issue, I joke sometimes that I think our IT team may hate me because I don't know anything about IT. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:27:15.2:  

I was given a timeframe, and I just know we're going to get it done by this timeframe. I wanted to kick off in April. We did kick off in April. Our IT team thought that we weren't kicking off. We were using Anaplan to kick off our FY26 capital plan, which was our initial plan. We just start building that in April. So they weren't ready to get us live spin data when I said we were going to get live spin data, and when I kept telling everyone else IT was going to give us live spin data. They had not promised that, and they reminded me, more than once, that they never promised that, because they were a little bit - were working on switching SAP… 

 

Steve Werner 0:28:01.0: 

Where does that data sit? Is that hana? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:28:02.4:  

So all the data sits in SAP, all the actual spin data. They're working on converting to SAP for 4HANA, so they are very busy.  

 

Steve Werner 0:28:15.9: 

Anybody else have SAP priorities going on all the time? Consistently? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:28:22.4: 

So they weren't ready to really start on the project when I needed them to start on the project. Once they did get on the project, they did it really fast, which then I reminded them, you couldn't carve out a week for me a couple of months ago, because it only took you a week to actually get the SAP spin data. So that was a little bit of a hiccup, in that we didn't have live spin data from SAP until June, even though we kicked off our project in April. So that drug out a little bit longer. And then the other thing we learned, again, an issue with our old system, our Excel sheets had a work breakdown structure so you could build your project and label out all of your different budget priorities. We learned that in our steel mills, who have engineering managers and a whole team building their project, were very good at that. We learned that some of our rebar fabrication shops, their capital projects are being managed by an operations manager, who a lot of times is just an old rebar fabricator who's just been around longer than everyone else. So turning on the computer is sometimes you have to help them, which button turns the computer on.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:29:34.4: 

Just a different mindset. So teaching them how to build out their budget was a little bit more of an adoption curve than we anticipated, because they weren't as familiar with our process, our old process even. They weren't even using our old process, and so when we kicked off the new process and now they're required to use it, a little bit of an adoption curve. 

 

Steve Werner 0:29:54.9: 

They're used to being out in the field actually dealing with the steel.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:29:59.4: 

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:30:00.2: 

With rebar.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:30:00.5: 

They just want to tie rebar together. So they don't want to sit at a computer. That is torture to them. 

 

Steve Werner 0:30:06.6: 

 

Yes, I understand. What about the - you told us a little bit around the cross-functional champions and the training. So just cover off on that. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:30:16.3: 

Yes, so - and this is really - I don't always brag about myself, but this is where they had to bring in someone. I started in operations for a company. I then moved to finance, and then they made me report to engineering. So that really my pay check and my bonus was all determined by engineering. So they definitely took priority. I understood what our operations team in the field needed. I understood what finance needed, and so I was able to really bring that together. I did not understood [sic] what IT needed. So that's where maybe I made promises that they couldn't keep. For the most part, I was able to bring all of those together so we could bring out a vision of what we needed in Anaplan. We knew exactly what everyone needed so that we could build projects in Anaplan, manage those projects, execute those projects, get those projects closed, and start bringing a return to CMC.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:31:13.9: 

So having a person who understood the whole business is really what got this off the ground because it had been dragging, as different departments argued back and forth over who needed what, and just not going out and finding a solution. 

 

Steve Werner 0:31:29.5: 

So having somebody that owns your program, that can really understand all the different functional groups, that's great. What about on the training side? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:31:36.6:  

Then the training side, like I said, we went on our world tour and really sat down...  

 

Steve Werner 0:31:42.8: 

You did that in person? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:31:44.0: 

We did that in person, both myself, I had another member of my team, and then actually members of our [unclear word 0:31:51.2] team showed up as well, so that we did… 

 

Steve Werner 0:31:53.6: 

Did you go to Poland? Nice.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:31:57.2: 

They weren't going to pass up Poland. 

 

Steve Werner 0:31:58.2: 

Depending on the time of year, I guess, right?  

 

Jason Jensen 0:32:01.8: 

So it was March. It was beautiful. It was actually [over speaking 0:32:03.5]. We actually were able to sit down and as we taught, hey, this is how we're going to do it, we had two to three people who could actually walk around and help users. So we were building projects in the test environment, and building it together on screen. Then we also had users who were sitting down, and as people got stuck, they could actually sit down and help them, hey, this is what you're doing wrong. So we were able to - really when we walked out of that training, we had, when it was all done, 80-plus users who could build capital projects in Anaplan. 

 

Steve Werner 0:32:39.8: 

That's impressive.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:32:40.7: 

And get them submitted.  

 

Steve Werner 0:32:41.6: 

That's really impressive. That's awesome. Sometimes just spending the time to be on site with your end users to help them through it.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:32:48.7: 

Yes.  

 

Steve Werner 0:32:49.3: 

It helps accelerate the route.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:32:51.3:  

It was something that I really pushed forward, because there was some talk, it would be a lot cheaper if we just did it online. I was like, 'Well, we could do it online, but if you do it online, I know how I am if I'm sitting through an online course.' There's 50 other competing priorities. My real job that I have to do.  

 

Steve Werner 0:33:11.7: 

You get distracted very easily.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:33:13.0: 

If I bring everyone in, I can make them not do their normal job during training, and actually focus on the training. So it was - I mean, we really prioritized doing it in person. 

 

Steve Werner 0:33:23.5: 

Good move.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:33:26.1: 

I think it was very valuable for us.  

 

Steve Werner 0:33:27.2: 

Well, let's talk a little bit - it looks like we have about ten minutes left here. So let's talk a little bit around where do you see this going in the future? What's top of mind for you? Then we'll open it up to Q&A.  

 

Jason Jensen 0:33:41.0: 

So for me, what's top of mind, I know we talk a little bit in there as a company, yes we will probably - we would be dumb if we didn't expand Anaplan out into some of our other - SIOP or FP&A. For me, what's top of mind next is, as we get into capital projects, strategic asset management, and how do we now start bringing all of our data in so we can start to predict when our machine equipment is going to fail? When do we need to replace a furnace? Start to predict really our capital budget out five, ten years from now, so we know, hey, ten years from now, our steel mill in South Carolina needs to build a new furnace, that's going to cost $120 million. We can start to plan that out today, so that ten years from now, when they need a new furnace, it's not like, oh, $120, what are we going to cut? We can start to really build around those big projects because well, we have 500 projects. Many of them are small. There's always those large projects, but those large projects dictate how many of the small projects we can fit into our budget. 

 

Jason Jensen 0:34:50.3: 

So if we can get to the point where we're really forecasting out, when do we replace our equipment, it will make really that forecasting and starting to plan, where are the spikes in our capital spending going to be? We can make accommodations for that in our planning. So that, to me, is our next step. 

 

Steve Werner 0:35:08.2: 

Makes sense. What about on the FP&A, procurement? Anything on that side that you want to share before we open it up for questions? 

 

Jason Jensen 0:35:16.5: 

So RFP, I'm not their decision maker, but our FP&A team, I mean they've looked at an Anaplan. There are people on the FP&A team who I think are - that is probably where we go next, will be in FP&A. We've had our SIOP team, who's really our Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning, has looked into Anaplan as well, and I told them all at the beginning, yes, it's here, but I'm first, so get in line. We're wrapping up our project so they can have their turn now. 

 

Steve Werner 0:35:45.8: 

Nice. All right, well, everybody, let's give Jason a round of applause.